1. Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to web searching protocols.
2. Information
In traditional Internet search engines such as Google, only data sources that have been searched and indexed by a search engine's crawler technology may be searched, retrieved and accessed by a user. When a user queries a traditional search engine the user is typically not searching the Internet as a whole but is actually searching the search engine's index for matches to a query and subsequent access to the data sources. Examples of data sources include webpages and databases, but not limited thereto. Search results from such so-called crawler-based searches have numerous limitations. For example, search results may be significantly out of date depending on the schedule and time it takes for a search engine's crawler technology to update the index for a particular website. Further, a significant amount of data may be contained in databases and web pages that may not be accessible to traditional Internet search engines because of limitations in crawler technology and access restrictions.
Federated searching is different from traditional crawler-based searching. A federated search may be defined by it's creator to search for data in a predefined set of data sources. Federated searches allow users to search multiple data sources with a single query from a single user interface. The user may enter a search query in interface's search box and the query may be sent to every data source defined in the federated search. Since a federated search typically includes a targeted set of data sources, the accuracy and relevance of individual searches may be improved for a given query. Further, the amount of time required to search the targeted data sources may be reduced over those searches provided by crawler-based search engines. The relevance of the resulting search results typically depend on the relevance of the data sources included in a particular federated search. Additionally, federated searches are typically inherently as current as the individual data sources because they are searched in real time.